Body Image

Body Image

the reflection of one’s own body in one’s consciousness, including the outline, dimensions, and boundaries of the body and the relative position of its parts as well as clothing, footwear, habitual articles and tools, prostheses, and the like. A body image is continuously being developed and altered in the course of one’s life.

The concept of body image is used in the study of various mental disturbances—such as depersonalization, impaired perception of right and left, nonrecognition of the parts of one’s body or the sense of their being spatially estranged, the phenomenon of phantom limbs, and the fantasy of a “double”—for purposes of topical diagnosis (for example, of a lesion in the right parietal region) as well as to solve practical problems in prosthetics. In aviation and aerospace psychology the concept of body image is applied to problems of spatial orientation (as in the system man-spacecraft-surrounding space, for example, or illusions regarding spatial location).

Since the origin of the concept of body schema, the idea of its functional plasticity has always been taken for granted, even if no direct evidence has been provided until now," said Alessandro FarnE of INSERM and the UniversitE[umlaut] Claude Bernard Lyon.

Topics include body image and body schema, sense of agency (sense that I am responsible for an action or movement) and sense of ownership (sense that my bodily movements, sensations or thoughts are mine), body deafferentation (lack of internal sensation or "propioception" of certain body parts), phantom limbs, the neural basis of intersubjectivity, neonate imitation, linguistic gesture, the causes and philosophical implications of schizophrenia, and free will.

Phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience overlap in an interdisciplinary look at embodiment, speech, and mirror neurons; dissociation of body image and body schema and ways of embodiment; dynamic interpretations of body image and body schema; and clinical approaches and the mirror stage.

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